To compile this driver into the kernel,
place the following lines in your kernel configuration file:

device ti
options TI_PRIVATE_JUMBOS
options TI_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT

Alternatively, to load
the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in
loader.conf(5):

if_ti_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

The ti driver provides support
for PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapters based on the Alteon Networks
Tigon Gigabit Ethernet controller chip. The Tigon contains an
embedded R4000 CPU, gigabit MAC, dual DMA channels and a PCI
interface unit. The Tigon II contains two R4000 CPUs and other
refinements. Either chip can be used in either a 32-bit or 64-bit
PCI slot. Communication with the chip is achieved via PCI shared
memory and bus master DMA. The Tigon I and II support hardware
multicast address filtering, VLAN tag extraction and insertion, and
jumbo Ethernet frames sizes up to 9000 bytes. Note that the Tigon I
chipset is no longer in active production: all new adapters should
come equipped with Tigon II chipsets.

While the Tigon chipset
supports 10, 100 and 1000Mbps speeds, support for 10 and 100Mbps
speeds is only available on boards with the proper transceivers.
Most adapters are only designed to work at 1000Mbps, however the
driver should support those NICs that work at lower speeds as
well.

Support for jumbo frames
is provided via the interface MTU setting. Selecting an MTU larger
than 1500 bytes with the ifconfig(8) utility configures the adapter
to receive and transmit jumbo frames. Using jumbo frames can
greatly improve performance for certain tasks, such as file
transfers and data streaming.

Header splitting support
for Tigon 2 boards (this option has no effect for the Tigon 1) can
be turned on with the TI_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT option. See zero_copy(9)
for more discussion on zero copy receive and header splitting.

The ti driver
normally uses jumbo receive buffers allocated by the sendfile(2)
buffer allocator, but can be configured to use its own private pool
of jumbo buffers that are contiguous instead of buffers from the
jumbo allocator, which are made up of multiple page sized chunks.
To turn on private jumbos, use the TI_PRIVATE_JUMBOS option.

Support for vlans is
also available using the vlan(4) mechanism. See the vlan(4) man
page for more details.

The ti driver
supports the following media types:

autoselect

Enable autoselection of
the media type and options. The user can manually override the
autoselected mode by adding media options to the
/etc/rc.conf file.

10baseT/UTP

Set 10Mbps operation.
The mediaopt option can also be used to select either
full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

100baseTX

Set 100Mbps (Fast
Ethernet) operation. The mediaopt option can also be used to
select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

1000baseSX

Set 1000Mbps (Gigabit
Ethernet) operation. Only full full-duplex mode is supported
at this speed.

The ti driver
supports the following media options:

full-duplex

Force full duplex
operation

half-duplex

Force half duplex
operation.

For more information on
configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).

HARDWARE

The ti driver supports Gigabit
Ethernet adapters based on the Alteon Tigon I and II chips. The
ti driver has been tested with the following adapters:

•

3Com 3c985-SX Gigabit Ethernet adapter
(Tigon 1)

•

3Com 3c985B-SX Gigabit Ethernet adapter
(Tigon 2)

•

Alteon AceNIC V Gigabit Ethernet
adapter (1000baseSX)

•

Alteon AceNIC V Gigabit Ethernet
adapter (1000baseT)

•

Digital EtherWORKS 1000SX PCI Gigabit
adapter

•

Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet adapter
(1000baseSX)

•

Netgear GA620T Gigabit Ethernet adapter
(1000baseT)

The following adapters
should also be supported but have not yet been tested:

•

Asante GigaNIX1000T Gigabit Ethernet
adapter

•

Asante PCI 1000BASE-SX Gigabit Ethernet
adapter

•

Farallon PN9000SX Gigabit Ethernet
adapter

•

NEC Gigabit Ethernet

•

Silicon Graphics PCI Gigabit Ethernet
adapter

IOCTLS

In addition to the standard socket(2)
ioctl(2) calls implemented by most network drivers, the ti
driver also includes a character device interface that can be used
for additional diagnostics, configuration and debugging. With this
character device interface, and a specially patched version of
gdb(1), the user can debug firmware running on the Tigon board.

These ioctls and their
arguments are defined in the <sys/tiio.h> header
file.

TIIOCGETSTATS

Return card statistics
DMAed from the card into kernel memory approximately every 2
seconds. (That time interval can be changed via the TIIOCSETPARAMS
ioctl.) The argument is struct ti_stats.

TIIOCGETPARAMS

Get various
performance-related firmware parameters that largely affect how
interrupts are coalesced. The argument is struct
ti_params.

TIIOCSETPARAMS

Set various
performance-related firmware parameters that largely affect how
interrupts are coalesced. The argument is struct
ti_params.

TIIOCSETTRACE

Tell the NIC to trace
the requested types of information. The argument is
ti_trace_type.

TIIOCGETTRACE

Dump the trace buffer
from the card. The argument is struct ti_trace_buf.

ALT_ATTACH

This ioctl is used for
compatibility with Alteon’s Solaris driver. They apparently
only have one character interface for debugging, so they have to
tell it which Tigon instance they want to debug. This ioctl is a
noop for FreeBSD.

ALT_READ_TG_MEM

Read the requested
memory region from the Tigon board. The argument is struct
tg_mem.

ALT_WRITE_TG_MEM

Write to the requested
memory region on the Tigon board. The argument is struct
tg_mem.

ALT_READ_TG_REG

Read the requested
register on the Tigon board. The argument is struct
tg_reg.

ALT_WRITE_TG_REG

Write to the requested
register on the Tigon board. The argument is struct
tg_reg.

ti%d: no memory for
softc struct! The driver failed to allocate memory for
per-device instance information during initialization.

ti%d: failed to
enable memory mapping! The driver failed to initialize
PCI shared memory mapping. This might happen if the card is not in
a bus-master slot.

ti%d: no memory for
jumbo buffers! The driver failed to allocate memory for
jumbo frames during initialization.

ti%d: bios thinks
we’re in a 64 bit slot, but we aren’t The
BIOS has programmed the NIC as though it had been installed in a
64-bit PCI slot, but in fact the NIC is in a 32-bit slot. This
happens as a result of a bug in some BIOSes. This can be worked
around on the Tigon II, but on the Tigon I initialization will
fail.

ti%d: board
self-diagnostics failed! The ROMFAIL bit in the CPU state
register was set after system startup, indicating that the on-board
NIC diagnostics failed.

ti%d: unknown
hwrev The driver detected a board with an unsupported
hardware revision. The ti driver supports revision 4 (Tigon
1) and revision 6 (Tigon 2) chips and has firmware only for those
devices.

ti%d: watchdog
timeout The device has stopped responding to the network,
or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).

The ti driver was written by Bill
Paul 〈wpaul@bsdi.com〉. The header splitting firmware
modifications, character ioctl(2) interface and debugging support
were written by Kenneth Merry 〈ken@FreeBSD.org〉.
Initial zero copy support was written by Andrew Gallatin
〈gallatin@FreeBSD.org〉.